Paul Rogat Loeb: Gutting the Health Care Plan

[Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the #3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association. His previous books include Soul of a Citizen: Living with Conviction in a Cynical Time. See www.paulloeb.org ]

Will serious health reform meet the fate of the scorpion and the turtle? In that fable, the scorpion pleads with the turtle to carry him across a river. The turtle resists, fearing the scorpion’s sting, but the scorpion reassures him that he’d do nothing so foolish, since both would drown if he did. Finally the turtle agrees. Halfway across, the scorpion betrays his promise with a lethal sting. As the turtle begins to drown, he asks why he took both their lives. “It’s just who I am,” the scorpion replies.

I fear we’re about to get stung again. When people look back at the failure of the Clinton-era health care initiative, they point, accurately, to an opaque process that produced a baroque Rube Goldberg mess that satisfied no one. That happened even before the insurance industry went on the attack with their Harry and Louise ads. But another element parallels our current challenge—appeasement of the insurance companies as the plan’s centerpiece, and the inevitability that these same interests will betray us again.

The Clintons assumed the insurance companies were too powerful to confront, so the plan had to go along with them. But once they assumed any bill had to get the companies’ approval, no plan could work, because it had to build in ways for the companies to maintain their profit margins and the immensely wasteful overhead they spend on advertising, processing claims, and turning down as many sick people as they can. Their approach also creates corollary wastes, like the third of the expenses of the average medical office that go toward dealing with insurance company paperwork.

Our health care crisis is so dire that the simple single-payer approach, as in Canada, should be at least seriously debated. Compared with us, most Canadians are satisfied with their system, in contrast with a recent US poll where 49 percent said our health system needed fundamental changes and 38 percent said it should be completely rebuilt. Canadians get a full choice of doctors (unlike in the US, where households have to switch doctors when employers change their insurance or insurance companies change their preferred provider lists). Tommy Douglas, the Canadian New Democratic Party leader who pushed through national health care in the mid-60s (replacing a system like ours), was recently voted Greatest Canadian in a recent contest, beating hockey star Wayne Gretzky and Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.

Even if single payer isn’t politically achievable yet, there’s no reason to take it off the table from the beginning. Doing so means most Americans never get to hear the contrast in cost savings, in allocation ease, in impact on ordinary citizens and their health outcomes. They never get to hear the story that might allow them to overcome current fears about losing the health care they have, being unable to see their preferred doctor, or being condemned to the Purgatory of endless waiting. Maybe we’ve been so conditioned that we can’t quite get the support for a full-fledged switch. A recent Kaiser Foundation poll still gives single-payer a narrow 49 to 47 percent majority, vs 67 percent for including a fully competitive public option, and maybe that isn’t enough. But at least we need to tell the story, so the probably inevitable compromise works down from full public coverage, as opposed to considering options that gut even the option of serious public coverage entirely.

Instead, because we’ve accepted the premise that the private insurance companies have to be included, we’re now starting to consider including a public option only if it includes poison pills that will doom it to fail, like requiring it be triggered by a set of exceedingly unlikely circumstances deferred to the indefinite future. Or requiring it to play by rules so onerous that it can’t achieve its straightforward cost savings. Or turning it over to the states, so Big Pharma and Big Insurance interests can simply, as Robert Reich warns, “buy off legislators and officials as they’ve been doing for years.”

But why assume that the insurance companies are our friends? Why appease them at all? It’s not as if they’ve played a helpful role in our current system. Rather, they’ve gamed it in every possible way, leaving our country with the highest health care costs in the world and worst health outcomes of any advanced industrial country. While they’ve made promises to cut costs, their promises are only that (like the scorpion’s), and they’re already lobbying with everything they have to gut any seriously competitive public option. Add in examples like former HCA/Columbia CEO Rick Scott. after his company paid a $1.7 billion fine (the largest in US history) for defrauding Medicare, Medicaid, and the program that serves our armed forces, he is now organizing attacks on any public program (hiring the PR firm that coordinated the “Swift Boat” attacks on John Kerry). We need to challenge the insurance companies, not appease them. There’s no evidence that suggests they’re constructive players, or are likely to do anything except defend their own parochial interest.

The insurance companies and other major financial interests are talking a good line of late. They have no choice if they don’t want to be cut out of the game. But ultimately, they are who they are, and their behavior reflects this. It makes no sense to embrace a partner who you know will ultimately betray you.

Maybe the public private mix is the best compromise we can get at the moment. But we must raise our voices now to demand a full debate on the other alternatives, like single payer, and then if necessary settle for something that gives a public option a chance, under equitable rules, to see how it plays out in efficiency, service, and cost. Trusting the insurance companies and stacking the deck to guarantee that private options will prevail merely assures we continue our dysfunctional system until its human and financial costs drown us all.

More Comments:

Kathryn Fuller -
6/19/2009

Paul Rogat Loeb is so right. The proposed 'reform' does nothing to challenge the power and profits of the insurance companies, who are currently spending millions of our dollars spreading propaganda about the evils of 'socialized' medicine and fighting the prospect of a public insurance option because it would be 'unfair competition'(if the same reasoning were applied to our education system, the public schools and state universities would be shut down)and 'too popular' (isn't being popular a key concept in a democracy?). The 'significant concession' of agreeing to cover people with previous conditions will be meaningless when those people are offered sky-high premiums.

Meanwhile, the medical industry is continuing to fill the coffers of Max Baucus and other key players. There will be no real changes until the cozy financial link between the medical industry and the members of Congress who are their beneficiaries is broken.

Another thing that needs breaking is the link between employment and insurance. This is a burden for employers - it is predicted that employers they could see a 9% cost increase next year - and it excludes millions of people from the benefits of group coverage, thus creating yet another source of inequality in our health care system. The people who, it is claimed, are 'happy with their coverage' won't be so happy if they lose their jobs and find themselves in the black hole of the private health insurance market.

The proposed reform will do nothing to help the millions of underinsured or to prevent medical bill-induced bankruptcies. The crippling deductibles and co-payments that many of us face will not go away.

The insurance companies have promised to cut costs but they will continue to spend millions on glossy brochures to market their 'product' (as though they were selling new kitchens) and to pay their CEOs Wall Street-sized salaries. Their promises are as hollow as Obama's campaign promise to ensure that every American got the same access to health care that members of Congress get. Fat chance.

It is unfortunate but perhaps inevitable that there has been a conspiracy to silence the supporters of a single-payer plan. Why do we never see John Conyers or representatives of PHNP on our TV screens?

Alas, it looks as though there will be
no universal health care under this administration. But if you're looking for high-quality tax-payer supported access to health care, there is a place to find it - in the members' benefits of the Congress of the free market-loving USA.